Conversation can sometimes seem, yeah I know – old school, y’all.
I mean, look how much we love being pulled away from it by technology tools outside our bodies.
Right? Why is that? Because we want the future and we want it now!?
And yet, even with so many new kinds of ways to communicate, we still move forward through time together talking. Thus the aim of this weblog: how to deal with it and hopefully continue to get closer while doing so. (Poet William Butler Yeats: “That’s all there is for men and women, just to grow closer together.”) (Or was it William Blake?)
Another poet good to quote in conversation is a later 20th century Beat from California named Gary Snyder. Snyder said the only reason tribe members started writing things down was because they couldn’t remember the stories otherwise! And as our tribal-cultural memory has been passed down through aural storytelling, we now see how we’ve begun to forget. (The couple in the cartoon up top may not have devices at the ready; perhaps because they’ve stuck all their memories and what-to-say-to-each-other in them.)
Luckily, friends and convo-lovers everywhere, we’re in the midst of a mass cultural shift.
Yes.
Have you noticed: Storytelling is King!
Your intrepid folk journalist was lucky enough to attend a wedding of two storytellers in upstate New York. An older fellow there told me: I haven’t seen this much talent since I was in the Catskills sixty years ago! The grounds were overflowing with tall tale-tellers, ribald playmakers, musicians, magicians, dancers and clowns. I felt part of one village I’d gladly take. Or however that goes.
Many of today’s less mountain-high tribal folks have a tendency to document our humanity as they live it. Via devices like Snapchat et al. Is this an attempt to get it down and pass it on before it goes away? Maybe we’re just simply using the tools we’ve created, playfully. Then again, playwright Thornton Wilder once explained that, “at the end of every great civilization there is a huge explosion of creativity.”
One big banging on a can, man? Is that what’s exploding all around us? Like, I’d love to chat, maybe learn a bit more about each other during my next coffee break, but I’m off attending to my social affairs! My personal media-me needs me! Hey, I’m being social, through a mediated experience. What’s going on here? Have we become what Ethan Hawke’s character in the movie Boyhood described as the robots we fear are coming for us from somewhere else some day?
But back to the storytelling The 92nd Street Y * in New York City, rallying to a belief that the oldest way is still the bestest way to communicate, has astonishing conversations between two good talkers made intimate. Move over on that couch, I gotta sit close to this! (LINKS BELOW)
Back Pocket Banter (Questions for Folk Journalists to Ask)
Have conversations failed you before?
How do they fail all of us now?
Do you consider Facebook a conversation?
Why do you think we distract yourselves with all these new devices?
What kind of new conversation have we created in the social media age?
Cultural Convo
Heard about the new “bullet screens” in China’s movie theaters? Audience members project text messages onto the screen. “At any time the screen may be overlaid with multiple comments scrolling across the action,” said the story I read about this phenomenon. The point, they say, is often not to watch the show, but to “tucao”— in Chinese to “spit and joke around” with friends.
Can that happen here? Sounds like a riff on Joel Hodgson and his Mystery Science Theater 3000** show, where audience banter get riffed over bad movies. In the Chinese version, according to the article, “Even when the videos are boring, the viewers are entertaining each other. Bullet screens are for young viewers who make sharing every thought a way of life.” (And if your battery runs down, just give your seat number to an usher via text; they’ll be by ASAP, “with a portable battery to recharge phones.”)
Now, does this seem like the end times of our amusing ourselves to death? On the bright side, perhaps it signals the return of the triple feature! And as they gaze into other’s screens together, leaning up head-to-head buried in each other’s hair, you have to admit these kids look adorable…
* To hear conversations and great writers reading check out these 92nd Street Y links:
http://www.92y.org/Uptown/Campaign-for-the-American-Conversation
http://92yondemand.org/category/poetry-center-online/75-at-75
* * Master cinema riffers from Minnesota (pre-China moviegoer joking around): http://www.cinematictitanic.com
Listen, I really think that stories are the best tool for empathy that we have. Aaron Sorkin, screenwriter “Steve Jobs,” in the Jewish Journal November 6 2015